Interactive Dig Tiwanaku - Revealing Ancient Bolivia. The prehistoric city of Tiwanaku is located on the southern shore of the famous Lake Titicaca along the border between Bolivia and Peru. During the heyday of this city was between A.D. 500 and 950, religious artifacts from the city spread across the southern Andes, but when the conquering Inka arrived in the mid-fifteenth century, the site had been mysteriously abandoned for half a millennium. Even after its abandonment, Tiwanaku continued to be an important religious site for the local people.
It later became incorporated into Inka mythology as the birthplace of mankind as the Inka built their own structures alongside the ruins. Tiwanaku remains an integral locale in the religious lives of Andean people in the turbulent present of modern Bolivia. In the summer of 2004, the archaeology field school from Harvard University excavated the location known as La Karaña, an area north of the site's monumental core. Click here for the conclusion to the 2004 season. Interactive Dig Yucatán. Thousands of entrances to Xibalba, the Maya Underworld, can still be found across the Yucatán peninsula. These water-filled sinkholes, or cenotes, served not only as passageways to the afterlife, but as lifelines for the present. In this riverless land, the Maya depended on the cenotes as their primary source of water. Great cities like Chichén Itzá and Mayapán centered around life-sustaining cenotes, and small villages in the Yucatec hinterland still rely on them. Cenotes were also the home of Chac, god of rain, and when the rains didn't come, Chac was appealed to with prized gifts--and human sacrifice.
From the Field A couple months after my first trip to Yucatán, I've returned to Merída for another week of cenote diving with Guillermo "Memo" de Anda. ...that, and the most wonderful discoveries can happen in the most unlikely of places. Meet the CrewGet acquainted with Memo and his team of students and experienced divers. Ask the ArchaeologistsQuestions? « CFEETK – Centre Franco-Égyptien d'Étude des Temples de Karnak. Bibliothèque des sciences de l'Antiquité.
Labiana Callipolis. Egyptian Monuments. Grands sites archéologiques. Bill Thayer's Web Site. Centre Européen de Recherches Préhistoriques de Tautavel. Bill Thayer's Gazetteer of Italy. The Marche are tucked out of the way, so that the casual traveller to Italy, and certainly those who scramble from Venice to Florence to Rome to look at famous things, will never see them. At best they'll cross the region on a train, or nip thru a piece of it accidentally by car.
Yet it is a beautiful part of Italy, and there is a saying — carefully fostered by the regional tourism authorities — that to see the Marche is to see all the country has to offer, in one place. Well, little by little, I'm getting to know the 4 provinces: Ancona • Ascoli Piceno • Macerata • Pesaro. Interactive Dig Tiwanaku - History and Context. Nestled in a Bolivian highland valley 13,000 feet above sea level, the broad altiplano of Tiwanaku is defined on three sides by mountain ranges and on the fourth by Lake Titicaca. Approximately in the middle of the valley are a series of large mounds and small platforms marking the center of the city of Tiwanaku, occupied ca. A.D. 500-950. A dense scatter of ash and pottery and other artifacts is witness to the fact that a large population once lived around these monuments.
For half a millennium, Tiwanaku artifacts--mostly religious in nature--were part of the southern Andes culture. By the time the Inka came to Tiwanaku around the middle of the fifteenth century, it had been abandoned for hundreds of years. The first Spanish chroniclers were amazed by the size and antiquity of the structures at Tiwanaku, and for the next few centuries a number of notable observers traveled to visit what became known as the "American Stonehenge" or the "Baalbek of the New World.
" Interactive Dig Sagalassos - City in the Clouds. In 1706, Paul Lucas, traveling in southwest Turkey on a mission for the court of Louis XIV, came upon the mountaintop ruins of Sagalassos. The first Westerner to see the site, Lucas wrote that he seemed to be confronted with remains of several cities inhabited by fairies. Later, during the mid-nineteenth century, William Hamilton described it as the best preserved ancient city he had ever seen. Toward the end of that century, Sagalassos and its theater became famous among students of classical antiquity.
Yet large scale excavations along the west coast at sites like Ephesos and Pergamon, attracted all the attention. Gradually Sagalassos was forgotten...until a British-Belgian team led by Stephen Mitchell started surveying the site in 1985. Since 1990, Sagalassos has become a large-scale, interdisciplinary excavation of the Catholic University of Leuven, directed by Marc Waelkens.
Field Notes 2003-2010 Investigation of Sagalassos and the surrounding countryside. Vivre au bord du Danube il y a 6500 ans. [Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée] : Accueil. MCC Accueil.